There will no Zoom call this Friday, December 23 or the following Friday, December 30. We’ll resume on Friday, January 6.
The Beinart Notebook makes a great holiday gift!
Sources Cited in this Video
The Times of Israel article that launched the attack on UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese.
The US government officials who piled on.
When Benjamin Netanyahu used the phrase “Jewish lobby.”
Why Americans have no term for bigotry against Palestinians.
Things to Read
In Jewish Currents (subscribe), Alex Kane reported on the fight over Israel-Palestine that’s dividing Democratic Socialists of America.
Last week, I participated in a panel on antisemitism with Rabbi Jill Jacobs, Professor Lila Corwin Berman, and Professor Alon Confino sponsored by the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
A fascinating analysis of how Morocco’s World Cup team both united and divided the Arab world.
MSNBC’s Ayman Mohyeldin explains why the US should be proud of trading Viktor Bout for Brittney Griner.
A Quote about Hope, for Year’s End
"No one, no matter how far left or how optimistic, standing in 1950 would have predicted that the back of the Jim Crow system would be broken within 15 years."—Professor Adolph Reed.
See you in January,
Peter
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:
We’re not gonna have a call this Friday the 23rd, nor the following Friday, December 30th. So, our next Zoom call will be the first week in January. I want to say a couple words about this controversy that’s broken out about Francesca Albanese, who is the UN Special Rapporteur for human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories that some of you may have followed. She’s been under attack by several top US government officials, not to mention a lot of people in the media, for some comments she made. The one that people have picked up on the most is a comment she made in 2014. This is before she had her current job, in which during Israel’s war in Gaza in 2014, she said quote, ‘America and Europe, one of them subjugated by the Jewish lobby and the other by the sense of guilt about the Holocaust, remain on the sidelines and continue to condemn the oppressed.’ Now, people responded very negatively to her use of the phrase, ‘Jewish lobby,’ and of course the term, ‘subjugated.’ And I think those comments really were problematic. It’s really important, I think, not to say that just because people are supporting Palestinian human rights, they should get a pass on antisemitism. It’s important to hold, I think, people to a higher standard than that, and to recognize that even in a cause that I think is fundamentally just, the idea that Palestinians deserve equal rights, that if people in the name of that struggle, who are part of that struggle, are involved in antisemitism or any other form of bigotry, that must be condemned. That you don’t get a pass for one because of the other. And I think, frankly, there have been figures on the left like Jeremy Corbin in the UK, who I think was somewhat blinded to the existence of antisemitism on the Left and in pro-Palestinian solidarity circles because he tended to give a pass to people on his side of the ideological aisle. I think one has to be careful about not doing that.
So, I think the phrase of Francesca Albanese is problematic first of all because I think ‘Jewish lobby’ is just incorrect, that there are pro-Israel lobbies—plural—in the United States. They don’t all agree on everything. And secondly, they’re just not all Jewish. I mean Christians United for Israel is probably, after AIPAC, the most influential pro-Israel organization in Washington. Secondly, to use the phrase ‘subjugated’ to talk about the US government does play into the notion that Jews have a kind of malevolent power that they wield over the United States. Now in reality, certain groups of or of Jews through political lobbying, through pro-Israel lobbying do wield some influence. But, I think, given the history of the way this particular stereotype has been used, and is still used by Donald Trump among others, one has to be really careful. And so, I think this lack of care with a phrase like ‘subjugated’ is really problematic.
Francesca Albanese immediately virtually apologized and said she would not recognize this language was offensive and she wouldn’t use it again. And I think that really matters too. I think when one condemns that language as antisemitic, one has to also acknowledge the fact that Francesca Albanese apologized. And I think it’s important to remember that many of the same people who tend to get most upset about the kind of language that Francesca Albanese used are also the people who basically condemn the idea of cancel culture and say that people should not have their careers destroyed because they made one problematic remark. In fact, Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti-Defamation League likes to say that he opposes cancel culture. What he supports is ‘council culture,’ by which he means that if people say something that is problematic or is antisemitic, that there should be a conversation with those people, and they should be given the opportunity to express some regret and promise not to use such language again. Which is exactly what Francesca Albanese did—not begrudgingly after a week, but immediately. Again, a pretty sharp contrast to Donald Trump, right, who as far as I know has never apologized for his numerous, numerous uses of kind of associating Jews with power, with disloyalty, with money, etc. So, that’s the first point that should be made here.
We can hold the notion that this language is problematic and shouldn’t be used, and also, I think, take the general principle that this shouldn’t destroy someone’s career, and acknowledge that many of the same people who are attacking Francesca Albanese in another circumstance would be taking that point themselves, right, that we shouldn’t destroy people’s careers. But why aren’t people taking that point of view vis-à-vis Francesca Albanese, recognizing that her apology is sincere and recognizing that in fact this is how things should work? That when people are called out on statements that are problematic, they should apologize, and they should get credit for that apology and then promise not to do it again. The reason that those people aren’t responding that way to Francesca Albanese—I think—is unfortunately because I think what really bothers them is not the fact that 8 years ago before she held her current post, she used the words ‘subjugated by the Jewish lobby.’ It’s simply the fact that she’s an advocate for Palestinian rights. It’s that she is working to bring international attention and concern to the fact that millions of Palestinians live under Israeli control without basic rights. And that’s the reason that she’s under so much attack, and the reason that she doesn’t get credited for her good faith apology. It’s not the language. It’s not this particular language, which is fundamentally behind the attack on her. It’s the fact that the great offense, really, is the fact that she is standing up for Palestinian Rights.
And I think what bothers me so much about this is that the struggle against antisemitism, you know, in the form of someone like Deborah Lipstadt, who’s the US Special Ambassador against international antisemitism, gets exceptionalized in a way that it becomes a way of justifying other forms of bigotry, right. So, antisemitism is a huge problem. And I think, again, we should take it very seriously regardless of where it exists, including on the political Left. But anti-Palestinian bigotry is also an enormous problem, right. And it’s a problem which is actually subsidized by the US government because millions of Palestinians live under Israeli control, under a different law than their Jewish neighbors, in which Jews have full rights in the West Bank, and Palestinians lack the most basic of human rights: free movement; the right to vote for the government that controls your life; the right to be a citizen of the country in which you live; the right to free movement and due process. All of these things are a form of institutionalized, anti-Palestinian bigotry—a much more profound form of bigotry and concrete form of bigotry, right, than the words that Francesca Albanese used in 2014, right. The words that Francesca Albanese used in 2014 were unfortunate, right, but those words are not part of an institutionalized system that leads to the demolition of thousands of people’s homes in Masafer Yatta because, as Palestinians, they live under a different legal system than Jews and therefore basically have no rights vis-à-vis the government that controls their lives. So, that government can bulldoze their homes at will because it wants to build a military base there—something they would never do to their Jewish neighbors, who actually have rights vis-à-vis the government, right.
And so, what’s so tragic to me, so upsetting, is the fact that instead of us having institutions in the United States that fight against antisemitism as part of a broader struggle against bigotry in which, yes, you could condemn Francesca Albanese’s comments, and yet you would be spending much more time, right, fighting against the institutionalized bigotry that the US government actually subsidizes and helps to pay for. That what we instead have is the position that Deborah Lipstadt has, which essentially serves as a kind of an apologist for Israel’s institutionalized bigotry and serves to go after and attack and try to discredit people who fight against it in the name of antisemitism, right. So that the fight against antisemitism becomes exceptionalized in such a way that instead of being part of a broader struggle against bigotry of all people, it becomes, essentially, another way of actually making it easier for the United States and Israel to actually practice this bigotry against Palestinians. So, it becomes—and this is the point I made in the New York Times a while ago—but it becomes not a way of struggling and defending the right to Jewish equality, but a defense of a system in Israel-Palestine of Jewish supremacy.
And that’s what bothers me so much about what happened in this case. That we need to get to a place where we can criticize statements like Francesca Albanese’s, but also recognize the magnitude of the institutionalized bigotry that exists against Palestinians. And if we did that, the entire conversation about her comments would be utterly and profoundly different than it is today. Because today, it’s taking place in a context in the US government, and in much of the US press and much of the Jewish media, in which the unstated but very clear assumption is that Palestinian lives just don’t matter nearly as much as Jewish lives do. And that seems to me really tragic. It’s something we need to struggle against. Again, we’re off the next couple weeks and I look forward to seeing you in January.
The Cancel Culture Right-Wingers Love